» Metrology

Underpinning the national measurement system through accredited calibration

National or international legislation, regulation or procurement specifications often require measurements on products to ensure their conformity with customer requirements. The same applies in many areas of health and safety, engineering, environmental monitoring and protection. The comparability, traceability and accuracy of these measurements is underpinned by the calibration of the equipment and reference standards used to conduct them.

Calibration laboratories provide these measurements, in many technical areas including electrical, dimensional, pressure, temperature, mass, humidity, light and time and frequency.

UKAS accreditation confirms the technical competence of a calibration laboratories laboratory against written practices drawn from the internationally accepted standard ISO/IEC 17025. At the same time, the accreditation process also checks that the standards held at the working level by the laboratory have been calibrated through a process which can be traced back to the definition of the SI units and their realisations at the highest level possible.

This current approach for ensuring reliable measurements, based on the existence of a universally accepted “'International System of Units"(SI) and an international framework for accreditation, ensures uniformity and compatibility of measurements for users.

By using this framework, regulators and specifiers can take advantage of a proven and effective system which provides assurance of measurement results and which can be adapted to suit a large range of requirements where measurements are concerned.

A survey carried out by NPL of 1,000 UK businesses aimed to understand how they use measurement and the impact it can have. The results provided convincing evidence that measurement both speeds up innovation and reduces risk, which helps businesses to compete globally.